Religion & Law

Last week I noted Deal Hudson's apparent application of just war theory to torture.  My post was picked up by the folks at Vox Nova, who observed:

If this is true, and Hudson did indeed make this argument, then it has grave implications. He has fallen into the consequentialist trap, when the Church has unambiguously declared torture to be an intrinsically evil act, regardless of intent or circumstance. The analogy with just war teaching is off.  The reason one cannot say upfront that all war is intrinsically evil is that some wars may be justified by circumstances. It so happens that these circumstances are more narrowly circumscribed that many Catholic war defenders are willing to admit, but the door is still open, even if slightly. It?s the same with the death penalty, but here the opening is so narrow that no case in the modern world would realistically make it through. But the door is firmly closed against torture. As an intrinsically evil act, you do not need to move onto the next phase of the moral calculus and ask about consequences. It is for this reason that a particular directly-procured abortion could not be justified by any appeal to circumstances, such as the woman?s health, material circumstances etc.

I wonder if Hudson is aware how serious this is. If he is thinking along these lines, then he is standing resolutely against the magisterium on a non-negotiable matter. Ironically, Hudson has been out in front demanding sanctions against those who publicly support abortion from receiving the Eucharist. And yet, if you interpret the appropriate canon in this manner? as I have argued before? than Hudson?s own manifest support for an intrinsically evil policy on this scale would also be grounds for banning him from communion. Not that I support that, mind you, but let?s please be consistent.

This prompted Deal to write a response.  Here's an excerpt:

2297 [of the Catechism] does not explicitly rule out torture in the case of gathering information to protect the common good; a confession is not that, it is an admittance of personal guilt about a specific act or set of acts.

2298 seems like a more sweeping comment, where it says that they deny "legitimate rights" of the human person and we should work "for their abolition.   I don?t read this as declaring a non-negotiable ban on torture, but I can see why there would reasonable disagreement on the issue. My hunch is that the language in 2298 about working to abolish torture is same as the Church saying we should work to abolish war itself.

. . . I was assuming any act of torture would take place with the context of war, in the face of clear and present danger to the common good.  I realize people are skeptical about such reasoning in the wake of Iraq, but the Church recognizes that war is sometimes necessary, along with all suffering and death that accompanies it.